It is 34 degrees outside as I write this and a glance at the pre-season schedule makes me sweat even more. It looks to me as if just about every player on the club’s books will need to be ready for a call-up, especially as the World Cup contingent will want a good break before they commence battle next season. Just to put that into perspective, the World Cup final is on Sunday July 19th while Villa’s first friendly is at Walsall on Tuesday July 21st.

Next up, on Tuesday July 28th, is a match against Real Sociedad, being played at Bescot stadium, presumably so that the visitors can pretend to be Walsall and enjoy the delights of the Pleck. Perhaps they will manage to pick up Black Country accents before they go back to San Sebastián. The Basque club has four players at the World Cup, so both clubs will be without some big guns. John McGinn might be coming home by the end of June, but my guess is that most of our players won’t be leaving the World Cup until at least a week or two into July. I doubt that many of them will be available for a friendly, even at Bescot.

As soon as the final whistle blows for that match, we go from the sublime to the even more sublime. The players and staff will need to get their passports and luggage together for a trip to Jakarta, in Indonesia. Presumably the main purpose of this trip is to raise the club’s profile in a part of the world where there is the potential to do a lot of business. The first match, against Indonesia All Stars, kicks off on Saturday August 1st. I expect the locals will be hoping to see our big names in action, and it will probably help commercially if they do, but I wonder whether the World Cup contingent will be ready for a flight of at least 10 hours, especially in order to play in friendlies. The second match is on Tuesday 4th August against BG Pathum United of Thailand, who are a professional club, so they could be Thailand’s equivalent of Walsall.

Then it’s a three hour flight to Hong Kong, for the inaugural Audi Football Summit on Friday 7th August, against a slightly better known team: Bayern Munich. I wonder how much Audi have had to fork out for this one. The match will be played at the Kai Tak stadium in Hong Kong, a 50,000 capacity venue with a retractable roof. It’s much more swish than Villa Park but I bet they wish they had our history. Anyhow, the financial boys must be rubbing their hands at a great opportunity to take the turnover up to another level. Bayern have eighteen players at the World Cup so it will quite probably be an excellent chance for the locals to see a lot of fringe players, reserves and promising youngsters.

Then it’s a flight home of at least 12 hours, and, by this stage, I expect you are feeling as exhausted as I am, never mind the players and staff involved. There is then a gap of five whole days, would you believe, before the next match on Wednesday 12th August, though it includes a flight to Salzburg. Yes, it’s the UEFA Super Cup match against Paris St Germain. This is when I would hope that our World Cup stars will have had all the rest and recuperation that they need, though it is still only three and a half weeks from the final, should any of them make it that far.

PSG have sixteen players at the tournament, so there doesn’t seem to be a lot of scope for whinging and making excuses. This is the pre-season match that it would be really good to win; we did it back in 1982-83, when we beat Barcelona over two legs and I am sure we would all like to see Villa do it again. However, since the beginning of last year PSG have played 14 matches against Premier League opponents in the Champions League and they have only lost 2, one of those against Villa. They went on to win both those ties on aggregate, so they have a very strong record and Villa will undoubtedly be the underdogs.

Whatever the outcome of that match, the team only has three days to get over it because we are off to Germany for our final friendly, against Borussia Mönchengladbach, on Saturday 15th August. The squad then has the luxury of a week and a day to prepare for the opening Premier League match of the season, a trip to the seaside to play Brighton.

Just writing down this schedule has made me sweat, though perhaps the heatwave has a bit to do with it. I think it is absolutely right that Unai and all the Villa decision makers should have a good break, even though the Villa news dwindles to virtually nothing. A friend of mine supports Arsenal and he has been complaining to me that he has visited various Arsenal news websites but that the stories all seem to be made up. That’s what you get when thousands of people are on the hunt for non-existent news. There are always clickbait websites looking to prey on the gullible.

We should start getting Villa news soon and hopefully the backroom staff have been working on bringing in some new blood for the coming season. No doubt a few players will be leaving, and the national media have always been keen to move our best players on to their favourite clubs. Every player has his price, of course, and perhaps we will cash in on a couple of our stars, but I think we should do so only if we are able to improve the overall strength of the squad. We were very fortunate to get through that lengthy spell relatively unscathed last season when our midfield was wiped out and the lack of squad depth was very evident.